Nagualli: Barbara Mor, "Letter [to Clayton Eshleman]"

Monday, April 16, 2012

Barbara Mor, "Letter [to Clayton Eshleman]"

May 17, 1990

. . .

Yes, I live in a desert reptile state, which is as Castaneda describes the southwest state (of mind): hypnosis. Hip gnosis. Slow and heavy-moving, while the scenery is neon. Image a gila monster with a cheroot, or the zoot-pachuco as nagual. But, as a Mexican writer (Reyes) noted, Mexican men escalate to death faster than any on earth. I was born and raised within the decor of this mood, but life with Pancho has of course intensified it. Life on Tuscon streets with an Aztec-Mayan streetfighter will of course Intensify It. It is a matter of enormously condensed and suspended energy, can blow up Universe with any microflick of the tail. But: is wholly uniliterary, unhistoric. These exist still packed in DNA; as Pancho says, "I am the Book." No-word dream-state of images, magnetic fields, and body action. It needs a good translator. The energy of verbal work, writing, is a high-speed or short-wave radiation. My brain works, but it is long waves, below the sound-threshold. I mean I don't hear much going on in there: the metallic drone of the Malabar caves, one-way traffic on Lead St. . .

No comments:

Post a Comment

about | co-curators

Here uncoils a collective psychogeography of the Americas—a personal exploration of indigenous poetics and epistemes. With a specific focus on Nagualism, the native American practice of self-splitting and metamorphosis, this collective project (executed as a continuous exchange between its collaborators) confirms that metamorphosis is a rapid, ongoing process without beginning or end, an antinomous exchange of excess in limitless operation. So while we post here, a chattering seed grows suddenly to a green stalk while a stone or mountain teems with personhood and animacy; and we match that overflow with overflow. Thus do we redistribute cosmic energy. Its first transfer long preceded our arrival; but we continue the exchange, the extension which is likewise our rootedness. To a great extent, this is simply a record of the personal reading habits of its co-curators, Jose-Luis Moctezuma and Edgar Garcia.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a californiano and a current doctoral student at the University of Chicago. His studies focus on technologies of the image in poetry, cinema, and literature. His work has been/will be published by Berkeley Poetry Review, PALABRA, Cerise Press, and MAKE Magazine. He is an editor and writer at Hydra Magazine.

Edgar Garcia's poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Big Bridge, Damn the Caesars, Exit 9, Jacket2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE Magazine, Mandorla, Sous les Pavés, and Those That This: Arts Journal. Author of Mayan Texts: A Galactic Birth Canal (Burnt Water Booklets, 2010) and Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012), he was also formerly a writer and editor at Hydra Magazine. An anthology that he has co-edited titled American Literature in the World is forthcoming from Columbia UP. In 2015 he completed a Ph.D. in American Literature at Yale University and began as Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.